It's the new picture of Google Engineering for at least some of us now. It's very hard to trust a company that failed this spectacularly, doing something so clearly very dumb.

This. I was thrilled when Google announced Louisville would be getting service. Louisville is a relatively tiny city in comparison, and not long after the announcement both AT&T and Time Warner/Spectrum lowered prices AND raised speeds. AT&T dramatically increased their own fiber rollout too.

When I first started hearing about the micro/nano trenching issues... I was really shocked Google would be so careless and downright stupid. After being allowed to use the poles, they chose to trench? In a city that not only regularly floods, but has near-constant road construction? Never mind how little quality control they imposed on the contractors to trench the lines, half of them appear to have been laid on the ground and half-ass covered with some dirt. It's an absolute disgrace of civil engineering, particularly from such a large and engineering-centric company.

Also, just as an aside, now that Google has completely abandoned Louisville and we're left with Spectrum and AT&T in most areas... Both have raised prices, and it appears that AT&T is starting to slow it's fiber rollout in some areas.

As I pointed out in another thread, Louisville is in the middle of Karst country and hugely restricts underground work for very good reasons due to all the limestone underneath the city. The city was very clear they had to use the utility poles because more than a century of civil engineering backs up the city's reliance on its utility poles. Google knew trenching wasn't a viable solution in the city and they did it anyway.